April 28, 2007
Astronomy rundown
McNaught Epilogue
The night we finally got to see Comet McNaught for more than five minutes Sally took a photo with her SLR camera. Given Wellington's light pollution and the fact the moon was out, I didn't expect much, but when she got the film developed we found the photo turned out quite well.
You can see both tails quite clearly and the longer tail is, er, quite long. Pity about the earth's rotation causing nasty skidmarks, but if it stopped rotating we'd all fly into space at several kilometres a second, so it's probably a good thing.
Giant arthropod menacing the Autumn sky
In other news, at the moment mighty Scorpius is rising in the East mid evening, with mighty Jupiter following shortly after.
These are the planets in our neighbourhood
And in further news still they've discovered an earth-like planet about 20 light years away, which is so close that in astronomical terms it's like two houses along from us, but in human terms utterly impossible to ever travel to. Given the distance radio waves from earth has travelled, however, if there's any malevolent, intelligent life on this planet, their battle fleets will be on well on their way here now. Oh, we've been such fools!
Blackholes or wormholes, or are physicists just plain arseholes?
Meanwhile, New Scientist reports that physicists have worked out that wormholes (of the DS9 variety) are, with our current technology, indistinguishable from black holes. So some of those stellar entities we currently believe are blackholes may indeed be wormholes. The article points out that they probably are blackholes, but they could be turned into wormholes if what we assume happens when blackholes form doesn't actually occur (physicists don't currently have an explanation for the universe at the planck scale, so this argument is plausible).What you should detect from all this is that just about all cosmology is based on assumptions based on other assumptions, and that actual knowledge is really thin on the ground. You can be reasonably sure that the new planet exists since it's quite close and it exists on low energy scales, so measurement and theory problems aren't too bad. But when it comes to the Big Questions about things like black holes, dark matter, dark energy, and the age and scale and origin of the universe, we have very little certainty.
Still, if the wormhole theory is true, at least I can stop having those nightmares about being crushed into a zero-dimensional point.
Posted by stuart at April 28, 2007 10:00 AM