Faster than light spacecraft

        I read an interesting article online about an idea for a faster than light spacecraft that could use dark energy to form a bubble around its self and decreases the dark energy in front of the ship to bring the expansion rate of the universe to a stop. It wouldn’t break the laws of Einstein: that nothing can travel faster than light in our universe. Because, they say, that the universe is expanding faster than light can travel and by using this expansion the spacecraft can exceed the speed of light. The only problem is that it would take the whole mass of Jupiter converted into pure energy to accomplish this! I don’t think we’ll see this for a long time to come. I wrote about something like this about black holes, that the compression of matter as it falls toward the singularity is squeezed to a point that it loses space time and could leak out of a black hole because it could exceed the speed of light- I’m only guessing on this part. Maybe this is dark matter or dark energy. Nobody knows yet what this dark energy/matter is.

Equation for Intelligent Life

        Went for my evening walk re-listening to the last astronomy lecture. It was about the different theories of the big bang and the universes that could have happened if it was weighted differently than the one we live in. Professor Bloom also discussed the prospects of intelligent life in other solar systems using astronomer Frank Drake’s famous equation N = R Fp Ne Fl Fi Fc L: (I copied the following from an online source)
N = the number of civilizations with whom we can connect
R = the rate of star formation (10 stars per year in our galaxy)
Fp = the fraction of stars that develop planets
Ne = planets suitable for life
Fl = planets that actually develop life
Fi = planets that develop life that is intelligent
Fc = civilizations that communicate
L = civilizations at the stage at which communication can occur
So you just plug in the numbers and depending on what numbers you use the results change in favor for or against intelligent life. Interesting!

Big Bang 3- Cosmology

        Got my new iPod hooked up and loaded with an astronomy lecture and went for my evening walk. The lecture was “black holes 3” and covered so much data that I’ll have to re-re-listen to it before I can write about it in any detail. It’s my second time listening to this lecture series from UC Berkeley. I only wished I had the talent and mental capacity to have gone there when I was younger! Anyways the lecture was about what happened ten to the minus forty-three seconds after the big bang, and we can only speculate what happened before that. Professor Joshua Bloom talked about Professor George Smoot of Berkeley who recently won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the beginnings of structure in the early universe that was the catalyst to forming galaxies. Very interesting! He also talked more on dark energy.

Lecture Big Bang 2/ Albireo Binary Star System

      I went on my evening walk re-listening to an astronomy lecture “Big Bang 2” that covered a lot of stuff previously mentioned and went into the structure of the universe (as seen by a fourth dimensional person). Depending on the mass of the universe which is determined by Omega (that is the density of space and the shape of space). If omega is greater or lesser than one the universe will either expand forever or collapse– one type of universe is the Positive curvature like a balloon that is called a “closed universe” has an omega of more than one and will collapse into the “big crunch”- then a flat universe that is open, infinite with no boundaries and expands forever- finally a saddle-shaped one that is “open”, has an omega less than one, is infinite and unbounded and the universe will expand forever. It is presently believed that our universe has an omega of 1 and is flat. The Professor talked about black energy that makes up most of the known universe. There was a lot more! When I got back from my walk Fat Cat was waiting at the back gate for me!

      Read on someone’s astronomy blog that there is a nice binary star in Cygnus located at the Swan’s head called Albireo that has a yellow-white star and a blue one. I just had to get the telescope out to give it a look-see! The dang binary was at my zenith (straight up) and it was hard to get my telescope that is on a tripod to view it. I ended up putting it on a table and tilting it back on one leg to be able to observe this binary star system, but it was well worth it! Just as beautiful as Algieba in the constellation on Leo!

Big Bang 1- Cosmology

        Went for my evening walk re-listening to an astronomy lecture “Big Bang 1” About Cosmology: that looks at the universe as a whole, cosmological principal: that assumes that the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe, and space on a large scale is both Homogenous: matter is distributed uniformly throughout the universe, and Isotropic: there’s no preferred direction in space.

        Read an article the other day “Before the Big Bang; three theories explore the back-story of creation” in Discovery Magazine that Ron left me. I know the subject matter somewhat and didn’t find too much of anything that I didn’t already know. There was one about the Arrow of Time that delves into the direction of time, entropy and equilibrium, where the universe keeps expanding and get to a state of “low entropy” creating other “Big Bangs”, which I found interesting. Also there was another that states there is no such thing as time, only now. This idea of only “now” is something I wrote about before in my column: “Thought for the week: An instant in time is all we have to plan for the future and think of the past. Thought for the week: Time is an illusion."

Quasars And Hubble Constant/Law

        Got home and went on my evening walk re-listening to an astronomy lecture on Quasars (quasi stellar radio source). A quasar is a supermassive black hole with the output of one trillion Suns and lies in the center of galaxies with a very high redshift making it very far (billions of light years) away taking it almost to the beginning of the Big Bang, some 13.7 billion years ago. This gets into the expansion of the universe and where the Hubble Constant/Law of the expansion rate of 72 kilometers for each megaparsec begins to fail at these very large distances. Quasars are powered by an accretion disk formed around the black hole where mater spirals in creating energetic electromagnetic radiation from a small area that out shines the galaxy which it resides.

Meteors and Super Clusters

        Last night I had some friends over and we were outside and saw four or five meteors in the span of fifteen minutes! The Perseid meteor shower peaks on August 12th so I’m thinking that these may be a prelude to the shower. I had Andrew point out the stars and constellations to Stefanie that I taught him.
        Then tonight I went outside with my binoculars and sat down with Fat Cat in my lap while I observed Sagittarius and all the wonderful nebulas, globular clusters, and open clusters that were filling the night sky. I saw five more meteors stream across the sky coming from the SE!

        Went for my evening walk re-listening to an astronomy lecture on colliding galaxies, galaxy clusters, more on dark matter, and the Hubble’s law that the receding galaxies redshift is proportional to its distance and are speeding away at 72 kilometers a second per megaparsec. A parsec is 3.3 light years or 30 trillion kilometers, so a megaparsec is a long ways away! The Andromeda galaxy is .077 megaparsecs away and that is the closest galaxy to the Milky Way. Our Galaxy belongs to “The local group” that has around 36 galaxies with a diameter of 10 million light years. There are larger clusters, one the super cluster in Virgo has around 1300 or more galaxies and extends 2.2 megaparsecs out from its center, mighty big!