Free Republic

One of the most radical and important ideas in the history of physics came from an unknown graduate student who wrote only one paper, got into arguments with physicists across the Atlantic as well as his own advisor, and left academia after graduating without even applying for a job as a professor. Hugh Everett’s story is one of many fascinating tales that add up to the astonishing history of quantum mechanics, the most fundamental physical theory we know of. Everett’s work happened at Princeton in the 1950s, under the mentorship of John Archibald Wheeler, who in turn had been mentored...

A comet first spotted by a Ukrainian amateur astronomer looks to be just the second known object to visit our cosmic neighborhood from beyond the solar system. What could be an even bigger deal is that this one was discovered as it's still approaching us. The comet was found by Gennady Borisov of Crimea on Aug. 30, and went by the temporary name GB00234 until very recently. After being watched by several other observatories over the past few weeks, it was given the official name of C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) by the Minor Planet Center on Wednesday. It appeared to follow...

If Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity holds true, then a black hole, born from the cosmically quaking collisions of two massive black holes, should itself "ring" in the aftermath, producing gravitational waves much like a struck bell reverbates sound waves. Einstein predicted that the particular pitch and decay of these gravitational waves should be a direct signature of the newly formed black hole's mass and spin. Now, physicists from MIT and elsewhere have "heard" the ringing of an infant black hole for the first time, and found that the pattern of this ringing does, in fact, predict the black...

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) said the fire broke out on the platform carrying the H-2B rocket about three and a half hours before the 5:33 p.m. Eastern scheduled launch of the HTV-8 cargo spacecraft. The statement didn’t identify the cause of the fire or what damage it caused to the platform or the rocket. Neither MHI nor the Japanese space agency JAXA set a new launch date for the mission. Industry sources said they expect the launch to be delayed by at least several days in order to make any repairs to the launch platform and inspect the rocket itself...

Exoplanet K2-18 b lies in the habitable zone of its host star some 110 light-years from Earth. In a major first, scientists have detected water vapor and possibly even liquid water clouds that rain in the atmosphere of a strange exoplanet that lies in the habitable zone of its host star about 110 light-years from Earth. A new study focuses on K2-18 b, an exoplanet discovered in 2015, orbits a red dwarf star close enough to receive about the same amount of radiation from its star as Earth does from our sun. Previously, scientists have discovered gas giants that have...

The enormous black hole at the center of our galaxy is having an unusually large meal of interstellar gas and dust, and researchers don't yet understand why. "We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole," said Andrea Ghez, UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and a co-senior author of the research. "It's usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet. We don't know what is driving this big feast." A paper about the study, led by the UCLA Galactic Center Group, which Ghez heads, is published today in...

BOSTON—The number of Earth-like extrasolar planets suitable for harboring advanced life could be 10 times higher than has been assumed until now, according to a new modeling study. The finding contradicts the prevailing notion that a terrestrial planet needs a large moon to stabilize the orientation of its axis and, hence, its climate. In 1993, French mathematicians Jacques Laskar and Philippe Robutel showed that Earth’s large moon has a stabilizing effect on our planet’s climate. Without the moon, gravitational perturbations from other planets, notably nearby Venus and massive Jupiter, would greatly disturb Earth’s axial tilt, with vast consequences for the...

Uranus, which takes its name from the Greek God of the sky, is a gas giant and the seventh planet from our Sun. It is also the third largest planet in our Solar System, ranking behind Jupiter and Saturn. Like its fellow gas giants, it has many moons, a ring system, and is primarily composed of gases that are believed to surround a solid core. Though it can be seen with the naked eye, the realization that Uranus is a planet was a relatively recent one. Though there are indications that it was spotted several times over the course of...

BEIJING, Sept. 9 (Xinhua) -- Chinese astronomers have detected repeated fast radio bursts (FRB) - mysterious signals believed to be from a source about 3 billion light years from Earth - with the largest and most sensitive radio telescope ever built. Scientists detected the signals with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope (FAST) and they are carefully cross-checking and processing them, according to researchers at the National Astronomical Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC). FRBs are the brightest bursts known in the universe. They are called "fast" because these blips are very short, only several milliseconds in duration....

AN ASTEROID which came crashing into Earth and NASA had no idea it was coming reiterates the need to keep a closer eye on the sky in case a massive space rock comes hurtling towards our planet. A small asteroid shot towards Earth at 14.9 kilometres per second, and NASA admitted it did not know it was coming. The space rock known as 2019 MO was just three metres wide and exploded when it hit the planet’s atmosphere on 22 July above the Caribbean, but the way it approached unexpectedly reaffirms the need for more eyes on the sky. NASA...

The planets are young: Saturn by Russell Grigg Published: 4 September 2019 (GMT+10) We continue our response to the 2019 BBC-TV series The Planets, narrated by Professor Brian Cox. In this article we are considering the fourth episode, titled Life beyond the sun, Saturn. (for the others, see Related Articles, below). Prof. Brian Cox begins this episode with something of a eulogy to Saturn: “Beyond the warm worlds of the inner solar system, beyond the gas giant Jupiter, in the freezing regions far beyond the sun, lies Saturn, a planet made unique thanks to a nearly 300,000-kilometre-wide ring of frozen...

BLACK holes could be a portal to another universe and our cosmos could have been born from one, a scientist has sensationally claimed. While the accepted theory on the universe began is the big bang, there are other equally baffling theories. One such is that our universe was born from a black hole opening in another parallel universe and that each black hole in our cosmos could be a gateway to another universe. At the beginning of time, 13.8 billion years ago, there was a dense and super-hot energetic point where the laws of physics did not apply – what...

A recent study, published in the Astrophysical Journal, offers potential explanations for the appearance of a green blob near the galaxy's center, which appeared and disappeared within weeks. The main goal of the NuSTAR observations was to examine a supernova -- a huge star explosion. The green blob, known as an ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX...didn't appear during the first observation, but showed up during a second one 10 days later. Another space telescope, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, then looked again and found the object, ULX-4, had quickly disappeared. "Ten days is a really short amount of time for such a...

Earth was born as a result of repeated asteroid collisions, the moon was created by a single giant impact event. Then, Earth's size attracted huge meteorites, which slammed into it, causing super-high-temperature rock vapour to cover the entire surface and evaporate all ocean water. The earliest life-forms survived such infernal events by escaping deep into the ground, miraculously emerging again and again. The Earth has gone through innumerable catastrophic events, and life has survived by acquiring new abilities to live through each crisis. Humans are part of the grand history of life's evolution, which has been closely intertwined with repeated...

Asteroid 6478...Gault was discovered last December and labelled as an active asteroid that left not one, but two trails behind it, just like a comet. Now, the same asteroid has been caught switching colours, from red to blue in near-infrared spectrum by astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), United States. This is the first time in the history of extraterrestrial materials that that astronomers have seen any shift in colours in an asteroid. Gault now glows in a blue tinge as a result of a less irradiated layer of the asteroid coming to light. According to the study’s...

This article is not copying for me, but I have heard about this before. What if it's simply things flying in front of the radio telescope? What say FReepers?

Forcing America to install literally millions of wind turbines and tens of millions of solar panels, and plant tens of millions more acres in biofuel crops, would devastate wildlife habitats and countless species, while driving up electricity prices for families, factories, farms, businesses, schools and hospitals. The wind and sunlight may be free, clean and green. But the massive technologies required to harness those forces for human benefit certainly are not. If Trump Administration advisors thought they could appease their opponents by implementing a rule focused on the useless and ultimately dangerous goal of limiting CO2 emissions, they were sorely...

Those who talk about carbon dioxide affecting temperature ignore the fact that water's potential to affect air temperature is well established in science. Water vapor is the only atmospheric gas that can hold or "trap" heat. Those who spend much time in greenhouses know that they are often very humid places because water evaporates from plants and from surfaces that get wet when the plants are watered. Meteorologists typically refer to the water vapor content of the air as relative humidity which is how close the air is to holding as much water vapor as it can hold at its...

In his book "2061 - Odyssey Three" (the third of his Space Odyssey series), Arthur C. Clarke put forward the intriguing proposal that the core of the planet Jupiter was, in fact, a diamond the size of Earth. Now Clarke, even though a science fiction author of some repute, had a science background and always tried to bring rigorous scientific accuracy to his stories. So, could his proposition be possible? The somewhat predictable answer is - we don't know. But we can analyse the possibility within known scientific parametres, to see if it is, at least, possible. For diamond to...

NASA’s Juno orbiter has detected ‘wave trains’ — massive structures of moving air that appear like waves — in the atmosphere of Jupiter Wave trains are towering atmospheric structures that trail one after the other as they roam Jupiter.They were first detected by NASA’s Voyager missions during their flybys of the giant planet in 1979.“Juno’s imager called the JunoCam has counted more distinct wave trains than any other spacecraft mission since Voyager,” said Juno team member Dr. Glenn Orton, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.“The trains, which consist of as few as two waves and as many as several dozen, can...