Amazing Light Show, with NO 'audience scanning' (just a few gamma-rays! ;)

[dsli_jon]

Here's a question - I have not yet been able to spend enough time 'doing my homework' to find out - or, maybe I'm just actually a 'dummy' and this is really very obvious...

Let's say you're out in Space, physically-located at the whatever-it-is 'X-magnification-point-of-view' that all these shots were 'taken' from, (in other words, 'close-enough' and yet, 'far-enough' away from those 'bodies', (cause they are gigantic) so YOU 'could see what Hubble sees' - and yes, you have a 'spacesuit' so you can breathe / not get fried by x-rays, etc, etc) - COULD YOU ever 'see' what Hubble 'sees'??

Yes, of course, not the bodies it only 'sees' with UV or IR cammies, etc - but Visible-wavelength light-emitting OR absorbing / reflecting phenomena, - like the 'gas clouds' - COULD we ever 'see' these things? WHAT would we 'see', if not? - anything?

I mean, these 'images' have GOT to have at least SOME 'time exposure', to 'see' all of this 'visual' info, right? Even with 'persistence-of-vision' (which we, as Laserists, know very well! ) that still would not give us the 'cumulative-vision' capabilities that film and/or CCDs/capture-device exposures do...

Obviously, SOME objects might 'show-up' after YEARS of an 'exposure'; some, 'relatively-quickly' (say, if looking at a 'body' in UV or IR, etc) - but COULD we ever see some of these AS we see them (or even close-to-as) in these pix?? - I'm thinking, NO - not much, if anything...

BUT, then again, if you've ever been like, in the middle of New Mexico or Arizona, etc, on a crystal-clear night and 'seen' the AWESOME sight of the 'cross-section' of our Milky Way - THAT is SORT OF due to a 'cumulative effect' (though not 'time-based', but a 'quantity-
based' effect)...and that is a LOT more 'far-field' than anything else that APPEARS like that (a very, slightly-off-center-viewing-plane, 'cumulative-visual', like a gas cloud would likely appear) that we can 'see' with the naked eye... a LOT 'further' than Auroras, for example - they are WAY more 'near-field', not really even in 'true space'...Soooo...???

Any Hubble / telescope experts out there?

... did somebody say something about 'verbal diarrhea'??

BTW, I think the Auroras deserve a mention in this section, as long as we are talking about 'space-based-particle-collision-produced light shows', don't you guys?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...een_aurora.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...a_Borealis.jpg

.. is that 532 I see there??

- J

[Dr Laser]

I know that exposure time on Hubble is always different, from second to years. Of cuz long exposures are atomic clock synced RGB UV IR multiple shoots. Also Hubble multi tasks so it's always taking pictures. Images are stored as a (RGB UV IR) FITS RAW image and then beamed to the earth trough a satellite relay. Then it's all translated, compressed and combined. Some images are "real" (normally ones with short exposure of close objects like Jupiter and etc)but most can't be seen with naked eye. Single exposure is just too dim to see. Thats why it needs a multiple synced exposures to make one bright image.

[Ian]

27 years, assuming my math is correct.

If you think the crab nebula is expanding rapidly, check out the predicted velocities for the gas jets from supermassive black holes. They reach relativistic speeds!

The physics going on in and around a black hole simply boggle the mind. You run out of superlatives to use!

Interesting fact: many astronomers now believe that a black hole may just be the most efficient engine for converting matter into energy. Of course, it's hardly a practical engine...

Adam

They havent turned on the new superconducting super collider yet though

[buffo]

Ha! Good point Ian!

I just cringe every time I read about the nut jobs that are protesting the SSC startup because they think it's going to destroy the earth. What a bunch of morons!

I just want to scream at them: "Damnit, if you don't understand physics, then you've got no business protesting. Shut the hell up and go home and educate yourself!" The SSC isn't the bringer of the apocalypse.

(President Bush, on the other hand...)

Adam

[Jem]

Wasn't the ssc abandoned in the early ninties?

Jem

[ajohnson30]

The most powerful image I have of that show is the "rover"...

Heh, several years ago (maybe more than 10) the series was being run on one of my satellite channels...BBC america probably..and there was a short commentary after each episode. The revealed that the rover was originally supposed to be something really nasty, but they didn't have the budget for it.

So they used a weather baloon and some fans to move it around. Go figure

[skulpture]

Wow, great thread. I have read through it all and wow my head hurts.

I have always been interested in space but have only scratched the surface when researching it. (In fact ive not read any text so I can't even claim to have done any true research to be honest!) Anyway...

Only agreeing with what has already been said: I have wondered for years what is 'after' space. I can not accept that it goes on for ever!
Yet, I can't accept that we hit a brick will when it does end (so to speak) but even if we did hit a brick wall..... there's always something behind the wall isn't there!?

I am starting to believe that (or convince myself - Im unsure haha) that if we carried on past space we would return to were we started. A overlap of time so to speak. Like folding a piece of paper over and joining to dots together. I dunno.

I wish I had the time to discover more, a lot of you guys know a lot of stuff and some of the theories are brilliant.

One final question.... can anybody explain the string theory to me in layman terms?

[buffo]

Wasn't the ssc abandoned in the early ninties?

You're right, Jem. In my haste I completely missed the fact that Ian referred to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN by the old "superconducting super collider" name, which actually refers to the canceled US project.

Though in our mutual defense, the new LHC *does* use superconducting magnets just like the SSC would have, so in a sense it is a superconducting super collider. So while it's not the proper name of the collider, calling the LHC an SSC isn't really that much of a stretch.

Just think - 14 trillion electron volts! Gonna be one hell of a bang when the beams collide, even if it is on a sub-atomic scale.

One final question.... can anybody explain the string theory to me in layman terms

The short answer? It's complex mathematical masturbation disguised as a theory of the universe. The math is so dense, you need years of study before you can work through the equations. (As opposed to the equations of the standard model, which can - for the most part - be deciphered by anyone that has taken calculus in college.)

Essentially it posits multiple extra dimensions beyond the usual 3 (or 4, if you ascribe to Einstein's idea that time is a physical dimension). How many more? Depends on the specific variant of string theory. Usually 6 to 8 extra dimensions. These are needed to make the math work out. Furthermore, it posits that all the elementary particles (electrons, quarks, neutrinos, photons, even theoretical ones like glueons and gravitons) are actually manifestations of "super strings" - 1 dimensional sub-atomic constructs that travel across membranes that can move through the extra dimensions postulated by the theory. The idea is that the strings "vibrate", and that the combination of these vibrational characteristics coupled with the portion of the string (or brane, in some cases) that intersects our 3 dimensional world work together to shape the characteristics of all the elementary particles. So the only difference between a neutrino and a quark might be the speed at which a string is vibrating at, or which brane it's confined to. (Confused yet? It gets much worse...)

String theory has yet to provide any testable predictions. As such, a lot of scientists argue that string theory shouldn't be considered a model at all. (Models can be tested.) Really, it's a clever construct of *very* dense mathematics that just happens to describe the way particles interact. Thus far, it works nearly as well as the standard model does, assuming that you take at face value all the assumptions required for string theory to work. (Assumptions that have remained impossible to test.) But if you can arbitrarily choose your constants to fit the data, and throw in multiple "branes" to fiddle with those constants when they don't match up with other data, then are you really doing anyone a favor by working on this fantasy theory?

Personally, I think Occam's razor applies here. The standard model is testable, and it *works* very well. Why introduce all this extra complexity (extra dimensions, and all the advanced geometric calculations that come with them)? Seriously, string theory is more of an exercise in mental gymnastics than a theory in my opinion.

Nevertheless, it has plenty of fans. I'm sure if you google around you'll find several websites that can explain the basics to you in greater detail. But to understand how complex the theory really is, you're going to need *years* of higher math under your belt. (For what it's worth, I gave up on the effort to really understand string theory after about a month of hard research. The standard model is just a hell of a lot easier to understand and use. Many scientists have come to the same conclusion as well.)

Adam

[skulpture]

Thanks for you're reply buffo.

I came across this website, some of you might know the guy already, Michio Kaku.
I missed him on TV the other night, apparently he did a documentary or something.
There are some really Deep articles on his website.
http://www.mkaku.org/articles/
Anyway, might be useful for someone...

[buffo]

He's featured in quite a few documentaries. If you get the Discovery Science Channel, you'll run across him frequently.

He's an interesting scientist... One that can both understand the complexity and still break most of it down in easy-to-understand terms for the layman. He reminds me a lot of Carl Sagan that way. Though Kaku seems to be a bit more fanciful than Sagan was. (After all, he *is* a proponent of string theory!)

Adam