Space Stuff

[funks 1]

I always thought astronomy was kind of cool. I am starting to think that our scientists are full of shit though. For instance, this article states that a blast occured 50,000 light years away from us and we detected it. Light travels 6 trillion miles in one light year. So based on that information they are saying we were able to detect an explosion 300,000,000,000,000,000 miles away????? I smell bullshit. How the hell do they come up with this crap???

If we can figure this shit out how come we cant find any of those green people that live on other planets?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6994277/

[CrazyIvan 0]

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I always thought astronomy was kind of cool. I am starting to think that our scientists are full of shit though. For instance, this article states that a blast occured 50,000 light years away from us and we detected it. Light travels 6 trillion miles in one light year. So based on that information they are saying we were able to detect an explosion 300,000,000,000,000,000 miles away????? I smell bullshit. How the hell do they come up with this crap???

If we can figure this shit out how come we cant find any of those green people that live on other planets?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6994277/

That's because those "green people" haven't exploted yet

__________________________________________
Blue Skies and May the Force be with you.

[champu 1]

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If we can figure this shit out how come we cant find any of those green people that live on other planets?

Getting there...

[billvon 3,067]

>So based on that information they are saying we were able to detect an
> explosion 300,000,000,000,000,000 miles away?????

Yep! We're talking about an event that makes our biggest thermonuclear weapon seem like a spitball. Had it happened to our nearest stellar neighbors, say Proxima Centauri or Barnard's Star, we'd all be dead now. Had it happened a little further away, say at Wolf 359 or Ross 154, we'd have seen massive climactic changes and deaths from radiation.

Think about it this way. Imagine someone claimed they could see you outside your house while they were standing on the moon. Probably lying, eh? Now imagine you set off a 10 megaton thermonuclear weapon. They'd probably see you do that, even if they're 280,000 miles away.

>If we can figure this shit out how come we cant find any of those
>green people that live on other planets?

Because people are what we call in science 'very very small.' So small that it's unlikely that we can detect their presence from even four light-years away. However, we are getting pretty good at detecting planets around far-off stars, so detecting life may not be far away.

[Acensky 0]

Pretty Cool, huh?
The weird thing is that it took just as much time as it did distance to get here. It might have exploded long before there even was an Earth.

I love this stuff.

Garbage bags do not make good parachutes.

[Casurf1978 0]

Take an astronomy class at your local JC. It'll literally blow your mind away. The star they are talking about is a Magnetar. Just as an example if we could put this little sucker halfway between the Earth and the moon it would suck your pen out of your pocket and erase the info on your credit card. That's how powerful this little guy, the size of a small city, is. F-ing amazing if you ask me. Just this quote blew my mind away "We have observed an object only 20 kilometers across [12 miles], on the other side of our galaxy, releasing more energy in a tenth of a second than the sun emits in 100,000 years." WOW

[funks 1]

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>So based on that information they are saying we were able to detect an
> explosion 300,000,000,000,000,000 miles away?????

Yep! .

But my question is how the hell are we able to do this?? What technology exists to measure this kind of shit to that kind of degree?

[WrongWay 0]

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If we can figure this shit out how come we cant find any of those green people that live on other planets?

Cuz they haven't discovered avgas and bonfires yet.

Wrong Way
D #27371 Mal Manera Rodriguez Cajun Chicken Ø Hellfish #451
The wiser wolf prevails.

[billvon 3,067]

>But my question is how the hell are we able to do this??

We have instruments like the Chandra X-ray observatory that are in orbit right now, sitting there, looking for X-rays. We also have an array of X-ray satellites (constellation-X) ready to launch. In this case, the blast was powerful enough to ionize part of our upper atmosphere, which is detectable on the surface of the earth through various means (like RF reflectometry.)

[funks 1]

but how do they know this came from 300 gazillion miles away????

[billvon 3,067]

> but how do they know this came from 300 gazillion miles away????

A lot of ways.

One way is differential time. If all observatories are in sync, they can tell that it came from a certain direction because the wavefront hit observatory X before it hit observatory Y. Then they can look in that direction and see what's out there.

Another way is via wavefront spreading. As a wavefront moves through the universe, different harmonic components propagate at different speeds. Therefore, the more spread the waveform, the farther away it came from.

A third is redshift. (which is Doppler shift, basically.) As a general rule, the farther away something is from us, the faster it is going away from us since the universe is expanding. The more redshift the farther away it is.

[Casurf1978 0]

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but how do they know this came from 300 gazillion miles away????

Here's a pretty good article on little suckers like this one:

http://www.space-art.co.uk/markgarlick/articles/an_magnetars.htm

Read the last two paragraphs. The whole black background and blue font is a bit hard to read, so I just right click over a few paragraphs.