The Space Thread

[KMD7]

1 hour ago, niallers said:

https://futurism.com/ic-1101-the-largest-galaxy-ever-found

 

Fucking mind numbing numbers. Incredible

You would imagine there has to be some form of life there.

[Bjornebye]

2 hours ago, KMD7 said:

You would imagine there has to be some form of life there.

There absolutely has to be life elsewhere. Thinking about the sheer size of the galaxy burns my brain out. 

[Anubis]

The debris from the Chinese rocket ended up in the Indian Ocean.

[Bjornebye]

9 minutes ago, Anubis said:

The debris from the Chinese rocket ended up in the Indian Ocean.

Hope it hit Bin Laden 

[dockers_strike]

19 hours ago, niallers said:

https://futurism.com/ic-1101-the-largest-galaxy-ever-found

 

Fucking mind numbing numbers. Incredible

The numbers are incredible, 6 million light years in diameter according to some estimates is simply beyond comprehension.

 

 

[dockers_strike]

Interesting! One of the questions would be, was it brought from Earth to Mars on the rover or is it Martian in origin?

 

 

[Bobby Hundreds]

That's probably already some kind of squid monster now.

[cochyn]

22 hours ago, dockers_strike said:

Interesting! One of the questions would be, was it brought from Earth to Mars on the rover or is it Martian in origin?

 

 

Hate to throw shade on this, but it looks like either saline deposits or dust-build-up rather than any form of fungal bloom. Daily temperatures can fluctuate between +6 to -70 degrees; so maybe trace water vapour condensing on cold metallic surfaces is leaving deposits behind? 

 

[Gruntfuttock]

Took Lola for her evening walk around 10.30pm on Monday and happened to look upwards and saw two long lines of Elon Musk satellites travelling west to east at the same time as the space station came over going southwest northeast.

[dockers_strike]

China's Rover descends from the lander to the surface of Mars.

 

 

[Anubis]

The bit where the little Chinese flag unfurls is pure comedic genius.

[dockers_strike]

How big is the Universe, what's it expanding into, is it curved? David Kipping gives his view on this in another great vid.

 

 

[johnsusername]

Anyone seen Apollo 11? Highly recommended. 10/10. Only uses archive footage, but looks like it was shot yesterday.

 

What a hero Neil Armstrong was.

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/feb/25/apollo-11-review-eye-opening-documentary-is-a-five-star-triumph

 

[Harry's Lad]

4 minutes ago, johnsusername said:

Anyone seen Apollo 11? Highly recommended. 10/10. Only uses archive footage, but looks like it was shot yesterday.

 

What a hero Neil Armstrong was.

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/feb/25/apollo-11-review-eye-opening-documentary-is-a-five-star-triumph

 

It's superb.

Armstrong really was ice cool under pressure.

I find anything to do with the Gemini or Apollo projects fascinating and marvel at what they did and how they did it.

Incredible stuff.

[dockers_strike]

1 hour ago, johnsusername said:

Anyone seen Apollo 11? Highly recommended. 10/10. Only uses archive footage, but looks like it was shot yesterday.

 

What a hero Neil Armstrong was.

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/feb/25/apollo-11-review-eye-opening-documentary-is-a-five-star-triumph

 

Absolutely. Had balls of steel. You just cannot imagine the last 30 seconds of the Eagle's landing. 18 seconds of fuel left when they landed. You wouldnt get that in a film.

 

I can remember as a kid watching the BBC through that landing but notappreciating at the time they had so little fuel left.

 

You could forgive Buzz maybe giving sideways glances at Neil around the 30 seconds of fuel call from Houston and them both thinking of punching out. But, Armstrong was determined him and Buzz were going to meet their date with destiny.

[dockers_strike]

Hubble Telescope goes into 'safe mode' due to memory module problem. With no space craft available for a repair, if NASA cannot resolve the issue from the ground, could it mean the end of the telescope's operations?

 

June 18, 2021 - Operations Continue to Restore Payload Computer on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope

NASA continues to work on resolving an issue with the payload computer on the Hubble Space Telescope. The operations team will be running tests and collecting more information on the system to further isolate the problem.  The science instruments will remain in a safe mode state until the issue is resolved. The telescope itself and science instruments remain in good health. 

 

The computer halted on Sunday, June 13.  An attempt to restart the computer failed on Monday, June 14.  Initial indications pointed to a degrading computer memory module as the source of the computer halt.  When the operations team attempted to switch to a back-up memory module, however, the command to initiate the backup module failed to complete.  Another attempt was conducted on both modules Thursday evening to obtain more diagnostic information while again trying to bring those memory modules online. However, those attempts were not successful. 

 

The payload computer is a NASA Standard Spacecraft Computer-1 (NSSC-1) system built in the 1980s that is located on the Science Instrument Command and Data Handling unit. The computer’s purpose is to control and coordinate the science instruments and monitor them for health and safety purposes.  It is fully redundant in that a second computer, along with its associated hardware, exists on orbit that can be switched over to in the event of a problem.  Both computers can access and use any of four independent memory modules, which each contain 64K of Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) memory. The payload computer uses only one memory module operationally at a time, with the other three serving as backups. 

 

Launched in 1990, Hubble has contributed greatly to our understanding of the universe over the past 30 years.

 

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/operations-underway-to-restore-payload-computer-on-nasas-hubble-space-telescope

[Dave D]

On 10/05/2021 at 11:39, dockers_strike said:

The numbers are incredible, 6 million light years in diameter according to some estimates is simply beyond comprehension.

 

 

This blows me away- what? How?

 

Located almost a billion light-years away.

 

 

 

[dockers_strike]

Not looking good for the Hubble!

 

The Hubble Space Telescope's problems have worsened, as NASA said the backup computer is also malfunctioning, nearly two weeks after issues with the telescope first arose.

In a statement released late Friday, the US space agency said that preliminary tests done on June 23 and 24 showed that the backup computer suffered the same malfunction as the main payload computer, a 1980s machine that controls the Hubble's science instruments.

'The tests showed that numerous combinations of these hardware pieces from both the primary and backup payload computer all experienced the same error - commands to write into or read from memory were not successful,' NASA said in the statement.

Since it is highly unlikely that all individual hardware elements have a problem, the team is now looking at other hardware as the possible culprit, including the Command Unit/Science Data Formatter (CU/SDF), another module on the SI C&DH.'

The backup computer had not been powered on since it was installed in 2009 during Hubble's last servicing mission. 

In addition, NASA engineers are also looking at the power regulator to see if the voltage being supplied to the machines are not flowing to ensure a steady supply.

Over the next week, NASA said engineers will 'continue to assess hardware on the SI C&DH unit to identify if something else may be causing the problem.' 

'If the team determines the CU/SDF or the power regulator is the likely cause, they will recommend switching to the backup CU/SDF module and the backup power regulator.'

there has been no update since June 25.

 

A joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency, the Hubble has been idle since shortly after 4 pm EDT June 13.

On June 14, flight controllers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland tried to restart the computer after they noticed it stopped working on June 13, but they ran into the same issue and could not get it to operate normally. 

Although it has stopped collecting data, Hubble's the cameras and other instruments are in a so-called safe mode. 

Last week, after several tests on the main payload computer, a NASA Standard Spacecraft Computer-1 (NSSC-1) system built in the 1980s, the space agency admitted the issue was bigger than first believed.  

'After performing tests on several of the computer’s memory modules, the results indicate that a different piece of computer hardware may have caused the problem, with the memory errors being only a symptom,' the US space agency wrote in a June 22 update.

'The operations team is investigating whether the Standard Interface (STINT) hardware, which bridges communications between the computer’s Central Processing Module (CPM) and other components, or the CPM itself is responsible for the issue.'

Initially, it was believed that a memory module on the NASA Standard Spacecraft Computer-1 (NSSC-1) system was failing.    

Launched in 1990, Hubble is showing more and more signs of ageing, despite a series of repairs and updates by spacewalking astronauts during NASA's shuttle era. 

The Hubble recently marked its 31st anniversary in space, doing so with an image of a giant star that is 'on the edge of destruction'.

The US space agency is going to replace the Hubble with $10 billion James Webb Telescope, however it has run into delays recently.  

The delay is a result of the European Space Agency-funded Ariane 5 rocket to launch not being ready. 

A NASA spokesperson  said this month the launch of the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope will happen 'no earlier than October 31.'

It is still expected to launch for space this year and James Webb will spent at least 30 percent of its first year studying exoplanets. 

[Guest]

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/scientists-find-monster-black-hole-so-big-they-didn-t-think-it-was-possible?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

 

Until recently, scientists did not think it was possible for a stellar black hole to have a mass larger than 20 times that of the sun, an approximation based on their understanding of the way stars evolve and die in the Milky Way.

 

But that assumption was metaphorically crushed in the gravity of a “monster” black hole that a group of Chinese-led international scientists discovered inside our own galaxy. The hole has a mass 70 times that of the sun, researchers said in their late-2019 study published in the journal Nature.

“No one has ever seen a 70-solar-mass stellar black hole anywhere,” Joel Bregman, one of the study authors and a professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan, said in an interview. “This is the first.”

 

Black holes form when a star runs out of fuel and collapses on itself, creating a strong gravitational pull that prevents anything — even light — from escaping. In the process, those stars lose much of their mass, producing black holes that reflect their diminished size.

 

The newly discovered black hole, named LB-1 by the team of researchers who published the study, is located 15,000 light-years from earth, according to a news release. And it is huge.

 

“Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our Galaxy, according to most of the current models of stellar evolution,” Liu Jifeng, a professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of China, said in a news release from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “… Now theorists will have to take up the challenge of explaining its formation.”

 

Previously, about two dozen black holes have been discovered and studied in our galaxy using X-ray technology that detects a bright light emitted when a black hole eats a neighboring star. While successful, this process limited scientists’ ability to find more black holes because the vast majority of them in our galaxy are not actively consuming other stars.

 

LB-1 was discovered by China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), which has provided scientists with a new way to find the estimated 100 million black holes in the Milky Way. LAMOST enables researchers to detect black holes by first tracking stars that are orbiting something invisible to more than the naked eye, such as a black hole.

 

When LAMOST identified a star orbiting LB-1, the team next used the world’s largest telescopes — from the United States and Spain — to take a closer look at the system. The results, according to the news release, were “nothing short of fantastic.”

 

There are two kinds of black holes. Stellar black holes, like LB-1, are made from the evolution and death of stars, which rarely exceed 150 times the mass of the sun when they are born, Bregman said. There are also supermassive black holes, which almost always live in the center of galaxies and range from a million to a few billion times the mass of the sun.

 

Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole in the center that has a mass of about 4 million suns. How supermassives form is unclear, Bregman said, but it’s possible they are created when stellar black holes merge.

 

“Black holes are basically the most mysterious objects in the cosmos,” Shep Doeleman, the director of the global Event Horizon Telescope array, has previously told The Washington Post. Even Albert Einstein almost didn’t believe they were real, he said, even though it was his theory of general relativity that helped predict them more than 100 years ago.

 

Black holes are “the most exotic animals in the cosmological zoo,” Doeleman said; scientists can learn a great deal about the universe by studying what they eat and how they behave.

Bregman said scientists are always trying to learn more about the birth and death of stars, and the discovery of one as large as LB-1 could inform that process.

 

“Is this object extremely unusual? Or is it more common than we thought?” Bregman said. “If we look at 20 [black holes] and find two of three of these things, that would be truly amazing. It would change ideas of how massive stars evolve and die.”

 

The study suggests some potential explanations, including the “exciting possibility” that LB-1 might actually consist of two black holes orbiting each other, though Bregman said that would be rare. The study also points to a phenomenon known as fallback supernova, which means that during the supernova stage of a star’s evolution — when it explodes — it only loses a fraction of its mass and the rest falls back into the black hole, increasing its size.

 

Another option, one Bregman thinks is most likely, is that a very large star did not shed its normal amount of matter as it evolved and before it became a black hole.

“This has big implications for the evolution, the final days, of massive stars,” Bregman said.

[dockers_strike]

1 hour ago, Shooter in the Motor said:

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/scientists-find-monster-black-hole-so-big-they-didn-t-think-it-was-possible?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

 

Until recently, scientists did not think it was possible for a stellar black hole to have a mass larger than 20 times that of the sun, an approximation based on their understanding of the way stars evolve and die in the Milky Way.

 

But that assumption was metaphorically crushed in the gravity of a “monster” black hole that a group of Chinese-led international scientists discovered inside our own galaxy. The hole has a mass 70 times that of the sun, researchers said in their late-2019 study published in the journal Nature.

“No one has ever seen a 70-solar-mass stellar black hole anywhere,” Joel Bregman, one of the study authors and a professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan, said in an interview. “This is the first.”

 

Black holes form when a star runs out of fuel and collapses on itself, creating a strong gravitational pull that prevents anything — even light — from escaping. In the process, those stars lose much of their mass, producing black holes that reflect their diminished size.

 

The newly discovered black hole, named LB-1 by the team of researchers who published the study, is located 15,000 light-years from earth, according to a news release. And it is huge.

 

“Black holes of such mass should not even exist in our Galaxy, according to most of the current models of stellar evolution,” Liu Jifeng, a professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of China, said in a news release from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “… Now theorists will have to take up the challenge of explaining its formation.”

 

Previously, about two dozen black holes have been discovered and studied in our galaxy using X-ray technology that detects a bright light emitted when a black hole eats a neighboring star. While successful, this process limited scientists’ ability to find more black holes because the vast majority of them in our galaxy are not actively consuming other stars.

 

LB-1 was discovered by China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST), which has provided scientists with a new way to find the estimated 100 million black holes in the Milky Way. LAMOST enables researchers to detect black holes by first tracking stars that are orbiting something invisible to more than the naked eye, such as a black hole.

 

When LAMOST identified a star orbiting LB-1, the team next used the world’s largest telescopes — from the United States and Spain — to take a closer look at the system. The results, according to the news release, were “nothing short of fantastic.”

 

There are two kinds of black holes. Stellar black holes, like LB-1, are made from the evolution and death of stars, which rarely exceed 150 times the mass of the sun when they are born, Bregman said. There are also supermassive black holes, which almost always live in the center of galaxies and range from a million to a few billion times the mass of the sun.

 

Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole in the center that has a mass of about 4 million suns. How supermassives form is unclear, Bregman said, but it’s possible they are created when stellar black holes merge.

 

“Black holes are basically the most mysterious objects in the cosmos,” Shep Doeleman, the director of the global Event Horizon Telescope array, has previously told The Washington Post. Even Albert Einstein almost didn’t believe they were real, he said, even though it was his theory of general relativity that helped predict them more than 100 years ago.

 

Black holes are “the most exotic animals in the cosmological zoo,” Doeleman said; scientists can learn a great deal about the universe by studying what they eat and how they behave.

Bregman said scientists are always trying to learn more about the birth and death of stars, and the discovery of one as large as LB-1 could inform that process.

 

“Is this object extremely unusual? Or is it more common than we thought?” Bregman said. “If we look at 20 [black holes] and find two of three of these things, that would be truly amazing. It would change ideas of how massive stars evolve and die.”

 

The study suggests some potential explanations, including the “exciting possibility” that LB-1 might actually consist of two black holes orbiting each other, though Bregman said that would be rare. The study also points to a phenomenon known as fallback supernova, which means that during the supernova stage of a star’s evolution — when it explodes — it only loses a fraction of its mass and the rest falls back into the black hole, increasing its size.

 

Another option, one Bregman thinks is most likely, is that a very large star did not shed its normal amount of matter as it evolved and before it became a black hole.

“This has big implications for the evolution, the final days, of massive stars,” Bregman said.

It's only Suns a lot more massive than ours that become black holes, isnt it? Once our Sun can no longer continue nuclear fusion, after it blows away its outer shell, it will become a white dwarf, I think.

[KMD7]

10 minutes ago, dockers_strike said:

It's only Suns a lot more massive than ours that become black holes, isnt it? Once our Sun can no longer continue nuclear fusion, after it blows away its outer shell, it will become a white dwarf, I think.

Yeah I think so. 

[Guest]

5 hours ago, dockers_strike said:

It's only Suns a lot more massive than ours that become black holes, isnt it? Once our Sun can no longer continue nuclear fusion, after it blows away its outer shell, it will become a white dwarf, I think.

The Sun will actually grow huge in size (possibly even engulfing Earth, ending the planet's existence) and become a red giant star. Edit: and then shrink again to a white dwarf.

[General Dryness]

5 hours ago, dockers_strike said:

It's only Suns a lot more massive than ours that become black holes, isnt it? Once our Sun can no longer continue nuclear fusion, after it blows away its outer shell, it will become a white dwarf, I think.

 

5 hours ago, KMD7 said:

Yeah I think so. 

 

1 minute ago, Shooter in the Motor said:

The Sun will actually grow huge in size (possibly even engulfing Earth, ending the planet's existence) and become a red giant star.

Messrs Hawking, Sagan and Cox over here.

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, General Dryness said:

 

 

Messrs Hawking, Sagan and Cox over here.

Like you're not fascinated by it, Patrick Moore. 

[General Dryness]

1 hour ago, Shooter in the Motor said:

Like you're not fascinated by it, Patrick Moore. 

Only when I'm not playing my xylophone.