Posted on 03/06/2006 5:16:39 PM PST by KevinDavis
At my age, I really should have expected this to happen. All of a sudden I'm seeing lots of little clues that the 1980s are making something of a nostalgic comeback. High school kids I speak to as part of my job have started wearing thin ties and studded belts, and I thoroughly approve of their newly spiked and teased hairstyles. The other day I saw a pair of plastic sandals (remember Jellies?) in a store window and heard Bon Jovi playing on a "classic rock" station. That's right; I'm a golden oldie.
Take, for instance, the fact that when I was in graduate school, a mere 10 years ago, we had no knowledge of planets outside our own solar system. Since we had only one example of a planetary system (our own), we studied its patterns and characteristics and tried to explain them with our best theories of planet formation. It made sense that all the planets close to the sun were small and rocky. After all, the sun puts off so much heat and solar wind pressure that it must have blown all the light material around it farther out into the solar system. That's where you find the giant planets, after all, like Jupiter and Saturn. More volatile substances, like hydrogen, water, or methane, needed the cooler, calmer conditions in the outer solar system to condense. More condensing material meant bigger planets, and - hey! That must be why our outer planets are much bigger than the Earth. It all made sense.
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
At the rate our imaging technology is advancing I'm hoping to see some good photos of the extrasolar planets before my eysight fails.
"All of a sudden I'm seeing lots of little clues that the 1980s are making something of a nostalgic comeback."
Man, I hope not. The 80's sucked. I had two 70's and jumped right to the 90's. :-)
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Okay, so where's Uranus supposed to be? |
The NASA project to look for earthlike planets was cancelled a couple of weeks ago. That was the one that was supposed to image these objects.
Cool! I've never heard that before. In fact I had always heard the Milky Way was isolated from other galaxies, thus lowering the risk of collision and keeping our insurance rates way down.
This information is really rather... creepy.
the full article isn't bad at all. shallow, but well presented.
Hopefully you can find it with both hands.........
j/k
Are you sure it wasn't just a case of double vision? The 70's were good like that...
related, a Blast from the Past:
Astronomy Picture of the Day 09-01-04
NASA | 09-01-04 | Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell
Posted on 09/01/2004 12:34:45 PM EDT by petuniasevan
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1204850/posts
Moving the Orbits of Planets
David Jewitt | Last updated Sep 2004 | David Jewitt
Posted on 02/02/2006 12:44:25 PM EST by SunkenCiv
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1570230/posts
I wonder if both scenarios might be right -- what if the inner planets start out as giant balls of gas just like the outer planets, but during the early stages of the newly formed solar system the Sun causes the gas to boil off of the closer planets over a hundred million years or so, eventually leaving just the denser, rocky residue that had originally been a small percentage of the young gas giant, but now remains as what we would recognize as an Earthlike (or Marslike/Venuslike) planet?
At the bottom of Urspine??
At the bottom of Urspine??
I hate when that happens. sorry
the universe is wierd. I would not be surprised if something along those lines has/had/will happen(ed) somewhere
Note: this topic is from 3/06/2006. Thanks KevinDavis.
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